1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an immobilizer for shopping carts which prevents a shopping cart which is equipped with such an immobilizer from being used outside a permissible region.
2. Prior Art
An immobilizer of this type is known, for example, from U.S. Pat. No. 6,362,728.
In said document, at least one of the casters on the shopping cart is locked when the shopping cart leaves the permissible region.
One disadvantage of this known solution is that the available shopping carts can be moved within the permissible region even at times at which the store is not open.
The shopping carts may be taken from the parking regions and become the target of vandalism, with indiscriminate distribution of the shopping carts over the entire lot also being one of the harmless forms of vandalism.
Even this harmless form creates severe damage since the individual shopping carts which are spread around far and wide require labor-intensive collection.
In the case of shopping carts which are equipped with a deposit payment lock in addition to the immobilizer, it is already made more difficult to remove the shopping carts from the parking region since a deposit payment element has to be inserted into the deposit payment lock for each shopping cart before the shopping carts can be uncoupled, but there is still no guaranteed security against unauthorized removal of the shopping carts from the parking regions.